Being inspired by Gamemaker's Toolkit's first season of its mini-series Boss Keys, which is a series that looks into the design philosophies of Zelda dungeons in terms of layout, I decided to do something similarly for the Metroid series. This idea was fueled by things like item randomizer algorithms and 100%-speedruns, because I wanted to find a way to chart out the areas of Metroid in an attempt to facilitate pathing and maybe even help Metroid fangame makers to think about design and gating in their games.

Metroid Prime was pretty easy to do, but I ran into the question of whether or not to include each room by name. It definitely helps with preliminary organization, but I eventually decided against keeping it like that for the final publication versions of the charts.

]]>http://metroidhq.com/topic/67/boss-keys-style-mapsRSS for NodeMon, 21 Jan 2019 19:39:08 GMTThu, 03 Jan 2019 07:49:03 GMT60Being inspired by Gamemaker's Toolkit's first season of its mini-series Boss Keys, which is a series that looks into the design philosophies of Zelda dungeons in terms of layout, I decided to do something similarly for the Metroid series. This idea was fueled by things like item randomizer algorithms and 100%-speedruns, because I wanted to find a way to chart out the areas of Metroid in an attempt to facilitate pathing and maybe even help Metroid fangame makers to think about design and gating in their games.

Metroid Prime was pretty easy to do, but I ran into the question of whether or not to include each room by name. It definitely helps with preliminary organization, but I eventually decided against keeping it like that for the final publication versions of the charts.

There isn't a real need to have this one, but I just wanted to add it for thoroughness. The locks on here correspond to ability tutorials: the Charge Beam for clearing a blocked passageway, the Morph Ball for squeezing through tunnels and into the Map Room, and Missiles for taking out Sentry Turrets. Then there's the one room with the Grapple Beam tutorial, and also the point where you lose your items.

Important to note is that puzzles involving the Scan Visor are not included or depicted, as you're supposed to start with it. This includes "puzzles" like "scan these 4 symbols around the room" and "scan this console to unlock the door".

While Magmoor itself is set up like a long hallway, there are very few obstacles set up from room to room that prevent traversal, until reaching the Spider Ball track in Twin Fires Tunnel. This explains the long horizontal lines in the vertical middle of this graph.

Similarly to Magmoor, the Pirate Labs are set up like a series of rooms to traverse, but the obstacles to overcome in order to travel from room to room are more combat scenarios than actual locks-and-keys, until reaching the Thermal Visor.